Why Were The Services Provided By The Freedmen's Bureau So Crucial At This Time?

In many means Georgia'due south history is integrally linked to that of the residue of the South and the rest of the nation. But as the largest state east of the Mississippi, the youngest and southernmost of the 13 colonies, and past 1860 the most populous southern state, Georgia is in certain respects historically distinctive.

Prehistory and European Exploration

The human history of Georgia begins well before the founding of the colony, with Native American cultures that date dorsum to the Paleoindian Period at the end of the Ice Age, nearly 13,000 years ago. The Clovis civilization, identified by its unique projectile points, is the earliest documented group to have lived in nowadays-day Georgia. The more permanent settlements of the Late Archaic Period, including the notable population middle at Stallings Island in the Savannah River, date back to 3000 B.C. During the Woodland Period, from around 1000 B.C. to A.D. 900, Native American groups in Georgia became increasingly sedentary, establishing villages and developing horticulture. Rock mounds and structures congenital during this era are found throughout the state, including the Kolomoki Mounds in Early on County. Dating to around A.D. 500, these mounds are the remains of one of the most populous Woodland settlements north of Mexico.

Presently thereafter, for the roughly eight centuries of the Mississippian Menstruum (A.D. 800-1600), complex native cultures, organized every bit chiefdoms, emerged and developed lifeways in response to the particular features of their physical surroundings. Georgia occupies a unique position both geographically and geologically, encompassing the Blue Ridge Mountains too as two different coastal plains, those of the Atlantic Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. These unique ecology zones drew a variety of native peoples to the region, leading to a greater variety of early Indian cultures than was found elsewhere in the Southeast. The numerous varieties of pottery found in Georgia today show to this diverseness.

Towns with defensive structures were built during this menses, as were numerous mounds, including those notwithstanding axiomatic today at Etowah, Ocmulgee, and Nacoochee. With the inflow of European explorers and settlers, the Mississippian cultures began to pass up, and remnants of various chiefdoms coalesced to course larger societies, including those of the Creeks and Cherokees, both of which played meaning roles in the colonial history of Georgia.

The primeval Europeans in N America, the Castilian, never established whatever permanent settlements inside the region that would become Georgia, as they did in Florida and along the Gulf Declension. Their merely attempt to do and so, during a naval trek led past Lúcas Vázquez de Ayllón in 1526, lasted simply 6 weeks. Spanish expeditions moved through the region from the mid-1500s through the 1660s, the most notable of which was Hernando de Soto's expedition in 1540. His party's documentation of diverse Indian chiefdoms provides some of the best descriptions of native life in Georgia prior to the eighteenth century. The Castilian presence also included Catholic missionaries, who established Santa Catalina de Guale and other brusk-lived missions at points along Georgia's coast from 1568 through 1684. These missions played a key function in assimilating the Native American populations of the region into the colonial system.

Past the mid-1600s English settlers from Southward Carolina made forays across the Savannah River and into northeast Georgia, engaging get-go in a thriving slave trade of Indians and later in the even more lucrative deerskin trade, which continued well beyond the British colonization of Georgia.

Colonial and Revolutionary Georgia

Georgia's colonial experience was very unlike from that of the other British colonies in North America. Established in 1732, with settlement in Savannah in 1733, Georgia was the terminal of the xiii colonies to be founded. Its germination came a half-century afterward the twelfth British colony, Pennsylvania, was chartered (in 1681) and lxx years afterward Southward Carolina's founding (in 1663). Georgia was the only colony founded and ruled by a Board of Trustees, which was based in London, England, with no governor or governing body within the colony itself for the beginning ii decades of its existence. Perhaps about striking, Georgia was the simply ane of the North American colonies in which slavery was explicitly banned at the outset, forth with rum, lawyers, and Catholics. (Jews did not receive explicit permission from the Trustees to join the colony but were allowed to stay upon their arrival in 1733.) Rum was eventually legalized in 1742 and slavery in 1751, marking the weakening of Trustee dominion. The colony was governed by royally appointed governors instead of a council of Trustees from 1752 to 1776, ending with the outbreak of the Revolutionary State of war (1775-83).

The initial impetus backside Georgia'due south founding came from James Oglethorpe, who envisioned the new colony as a refuge for the debtors who crowded London prisons; however, no such prisoners were amongst the initial settlers. Military concerns were a far more than motivating force for the British government, which wanted Georgia (named for King George Ii) every bit a buffer zone to protect South Carolina and its other southern colonies against incursions from Florida by the Spanish, Britain's greatest rival for North American territory. Every bit a result, a serial of fortifications was congenital along the coast, and on several occasions, most notably the Battle of Bloody Marsh on St. Simons Island, British troops that were commanded and financed by Oglethorpe kept the Spanish at bay.

Every bit the colony with the shortest colonial feel, smallest population, and least development, Georgia remained largely on the periphery of Revolutionary State of war politics and wartime action. Though Georgians resisted British trade regulation, they tended to sympathise with British interests because purple dominion had brought prosperity for many colonists and because they desired the presence of British troops to stalk the threat of Indian attacks.

The colony, and then the land, was well represented at the Second Continental Congress (1775-81) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with 3 Georgians—Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, and George Walton —signing the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. In 1787 two Georgians, Abraham Baldwin and William Few Jr., signed the new U.Southward. Constitution at the Ramble Convention, also in Philadelphia, and Georgia became the fourth state (following Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey) to enter the Union when it ratified the Constitution on January 2, 1788.

While Georgia saw several backcountry skirmishes also as some attempted incursions into Florida, the Siege of Savannah in 1779 was the most serious military confrontation betwixt British and American troops, equally the latter, with help from French forces, tried unsuccessfully to liberate the city from its yearlong occupation by British troops. That same year, the capital was moved from Savannah to Augusta (Georgia'due south second oldest urban center), and non long after, the Battle of Kettle Creek took place in nearby Wilkes County. Possibly present at Kettle Creek was legendary Georgian Nancy Hart, a female patriot and spy credited with killing several Tories at her home.

After the Trustees lifted the ban on slavery in the colony, Georgians moved apace to establish a coastal plantation economy based on rice and Sea Island cotton fiber. It was in Georgia that mayhap the virtually fateful development for the future of American slavery and the southern economy occurred in 1793, with Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton wool gin during a visit to the plantation of Catharine Greene, the widow of military leader Nathanael Greene. That invention chop-chop led to the development of the Black Belt region, a wide geographical swath with a pronounced concentration of enslaved African Americans and cotton cultivation. This chugalug spread from S Carolina through Alabama, Mississippi, and across, and included much of primal and southwestern Georgia.

The frontier settlement of Georgia was fraught with drama and conflict, from the infamous Yazoo land fraud that dominated state politics for much of the 1790s and beyond, to the gold rush in the north Georgia mountains in the 1830s, the most extensive and profitable gold rush due east of the Mississippi River. It was on that frontier that the state founded, in a 1785 charter, the Academy of Georgia, the first university in the nation established past a country authorities. Sixteen years afterward the school opened its doors in the wilderness from which Athens later emerged. Some other notable kickoff was the institution in 1836 of Wesleyan College in Macon, the start degree-granting women's higher in the world.

Along with Alabama and Mississippi, Georgia was domicile to a significant Native American populace for much longer than any other state forth the Eastern Seaboard. While white Georgians were non alone in their conflicts with and ultimate removal of that native presence (in Georgia'south case, of the Creeks and the Cherokees), the tragic circumstances of the Cherokees' forced exile from the state'due south northwestern territory in 1838-39, known equally the "Trail of Tears," became a especially strong symbol of the trauma and suffering that all such removals entailed. Georgia also had the distinction of being the but southern country challenged over Indian sovereignty in a U.S. Supreme Courtroom instance, Worcester v. Georgia (1832).

The construction of railroads connecting Athens, Augusta, Macon, and Savannah was some other of import development in Georgia during the 1830s. Atlanta, originally named Terminus, was founded in 1837 as the finish of the rail system's line and later on grew into one of the Due south'due south principal cities. By the 1850s the state claimed more miles of rail lines than did any of its southern neighbors, positioning Georgia as an of import habitation front during the Civil War (1861-65).

Civil War and Reconstruction

Past 1860 the "Empire State of the South," as an increasingly industrialized Georgia had come to be known, was the 2d-largest land in surface area e of the Mississippi River. (But Virginia was larger, until its northwestern counties withdrew to form the carve up state of Due west Virginia in 1863.) As both an Atlantic seaboard state and a Deep Due south state, Georgia played a particularly crucial role in the secession crunch and the formation of the Confederacy. It had the largest population and the largest number of both enslaved people and enslavers of any Deep South state (and was 2nd only to Virginia overall), and however it had two vast geographical areas in which slavery played only a minimal role—the southeastern wiregrass and longleaf pine forest region, and the northern mountains. Georgia became the fifth state to secede from the Spousal relationship, on January 19, 1861, yet the state'southward geographical diversity and the dominance of its nonslaveholding white populace made its selection of delegates to the 1861 secession convention one of the most divided (in terms of delegates for and against secession) within the starting time moving ridge of southern states to leave the Union. The terminal vote to secede, however, was supported past a sizeable majority of those delegates.

During the Civil State of war Georgians played a prominent office in the new Amalgamated regime. Howell Cobb presided over the Confederacy's organizing convention in Montgomery, Alabama, in February 1861, and his brother Thomas R. R. Cobb was the primary author of the Amalgamated Constitution. Alexander Stephens served as vice president throughout the Confederacy's iv-twelvemonth existence, and Robert Toombs was its secretarial assistant of state. Paradoxically, Governor Joseph E. Chocolate-brown was one of the almost forceful governors (along with Zebulon B. Vance in N Carolina) to challenge the centralizing tendencies of Jefferson Davis's administration in Richmond, Virginia.

The most decisive armed forces incursion into the Deep Southward occurred during Union full general William T. Sherman'due south entrada from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Atlanta in the bound and summer of 1864. The autumn of Atlanta in September 1864, a major armed services and psychological setback to Amalgamated forces, secured U.S. president Abraham Lincoln'due south reelection less than two months afterwards. Sherman'due south subsequent military campaign, known as the March to the Sea, was an equally devastating blow to southern morale, capped past the December occupation of Savannah, which Sherman presented to Lincoln every bit a Christmas nowadays. Another distinguishing feature of the war in Georgia was the presence of the prison camp at Andersonville, the largest and most notorious of the Amalgamated prison house camps. Andersonville became the source of much postwar propaganda and notoriety due to the high casualty charge per unit among its prisoners, and its commander, Swiss-born Henry Wirz, became a scapegoat for Northern anger as the only Confederate executed for war crimes.

Georgians experienced Reconstruction much like the residents of other southern states. The postwar years were filled with political tensions, struggles over federal occupation, and racial violence, with both the Freedmen's Bureau and the Ku Klux Klan playing as prominent a function in Georgia as in any former Confederate state. More than than 460,000 enslaved people were freed in Georgia during and after the war. Sherman was withal in Savannah when he issued Field Order No. xv, a radical plan for country redistribution to the emancipated Black populace. The Order, which offered what were ultimately simulated hopes to freedpeople throughout the Due south, provides the origin of the term "40 acres and a mule."

Freedmen's Bureau — Freedmen'due south Agency

Another notable aspect of Georgia'due south Reconstruction was the Full general Assembly'due south expulsion in 1868 of twenty-seven duly elected Black Republican legislators, despite the fact that Republicans and so held both the governorship, in Rufus Bullock, and a majority in the state senate. That activeness, forth with the subsequent Camilla Massacre, which left about a dozen Black protestors expressionless and thirty wounded, led the U.S. Congress to reimpose military rule to the land and to ban Georgia's newly elected congressmen from taking their seats in the side by side Business firm of Representatives. This action provided a strong lesson in federal power to other southerners who had hoped to subvert the federal law and constitutional amendments.

Although this setback made Georgia the last of the sometime Confederate states to exist readmitted to the Union, with its congressmen finally seated on July 15, 1870, Reconstruction ended relatively early in the country. In belatedly 1871 the state regime returned to the full command of white conservative Democrats, known every bit "Redeemers," thereby ushering in what white southerners once termed the "Redemption era." At that fourth dimension, several other southern states were still under Republican rule and war machine occupation, and would remain and so for upwards to five more years.

The "New Southward" and Populism

The Redemption era in Georgia marked a return to ability of several antebellum and wartime leaders, nearly notably the group known as the "Bourbon Triumvirate," consisting of former Confederate governor Joseph East. Brownish and former Confederate generals John B. Gordon and Alfred H. Colquitt. These three politicians maintained power within Georgia every bit governors and/or U.South. senators from 1872 until 1890, capitalizing on their positions to industrialize the state, often for their ain profit. The triumvirate's efforts were bolstered by Henry W. Grady, the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, who spearheaded a cause to build a prosperous "New Due south" centered around Atlanta. Using his considerable journalistic and oratorical skills, Grady fashioned an emotional portrait of Atlanta, which had replaced Milledgeville equally the state uppercase in 1868, rising phoenix-like from the ashes of war to become the capital of a dynamic and progressive New S. The vision he articulated for much of the 1880s stood very much at odds with both the reality and the broad national impression of Atlanta, as well every bit the state at big, by the turn of the century.

Despite Grady'southward vision, Georgia remained predominantly rural, with most of the state's citizens attempting to survive as farmers. The loss of the slave labor forcefulness dealt a severe blow to cotton fiber production, which, compounded by a decline in the demand for cotton worldwide, left Georgia agriculture in dire financial circumstances. Neglected by a government focused on industrial and business opportunities, farmers had no selection but to participate in the tenant and crop lien systems, which imposed an exploitative and stifling credit organisation. By 1880 45 percentage of Georgia's farmers, Black and white, had been driven into tenancy, and by 1920 two-thirds of farmers worked on country they did non own, most often as sharecroppers.

The ascension of the Farmers' Alliance and the Populist Party in Georgia during the late nineteenth century allowed farmers to protest the situation. Formally organized in 1892, the Populist Party, under the leadership of Thomas Eastward. Watson, offered a platform of banking and railroad reform, as well as cooperative farm exchange. For many elite white and politically entrenched Georgians, the true danger of Populism lay not in its economic policies only in its racial inclusiveness, as Blackness farmers were encouraged to participate in the new third-party motion.

Watson championed this biracial alliance, and he accomplished national condition as a Populist leader, gaining the political party's nomination for vice president in 1896, thereby becoming the first Georgian to run on a national ticket since William Harris Crawford in 1824. Even every bit Watson received this recognition, all the same, the Populists lost ground nationally when the Autonomous candidate, William Jennings Bryan, co-opted their advocacy of the unlimited coinage of silver. Ultimately, the election was lost to the Republican candidate William McKinley.

Jim Crow

The demise of the Populists had consequences in Georgia (and across the S) that extended beyond their failure as a tertiary party. In the wake of Populism's unsuccessful efforts to challenge the established racial bureaucracy, reactionary heirs of the Bourbon Triumvirate worked to curtail the political ability of Blackness voters, too equally to formalize the convention of social segregation. In 1908 an amendment to the state constitution established literacy and belongings requirements to supplement the poll tax, effectively barring voting by Blacks, and many poor whites as well. This disfranchisement, forth with legislatively mandated racial segregation of public facilities, defined the Jim Crow era that would prevail in Georgia and the South for more than half a century.

At the same time, the suppression of Black citizens took a far more trigger-happy turn. More lynchings took place in Georgia betwixt 1889 and 1918 than anywhere else in the U.s.a., and Atlanta cringed in the aftermath of a brutal, three-day race anarchism in September 1906. While most lynchings were racially motivated, the near notorious was that of Leo Frank, a Jew, who was taken from prison in August 1915 past a mob and hanged about Marietta afterwards beingness convicted of murdering Mary Phagan, an Atlanta pencil factory worker. A few months later the Ku Klux Klan was ceremonially resurrected atop Stone Mount. National attending to both the Leo Frank lynching and the rebirth of the Klan seriously damaged Georgia'south image, with farther show of its benightedness brought on two decades afterward by iii best-selling books: I Am a Avoiding from a Georgia Concatenation Gang! (1932), a memoir by Robert E. Burns; and Erskine Caldwell'south novels Tobacco Road (1932) and God'due south Petty Acre (1933) .

The Swell Depression and Globe State of war Ii

Meanwhile, for all the talk of progress and prosperity emanating from Atlanta and other cities, atmospheric condition in the countryside went from bad to worse. The boll weevil became a major problem upon its introduction to the state in 1915 and led to a abrupt drop in cotton fiber production, with the number of bales produced in 1923 just about a fourth of the number produced five years earlier. During the 1920s more than 400,000 residents, nigh all Black, migrated to other parts of the land, and betwixt 1910 and 1930 nearly half the state's agronomical workers had abandoned farming.

The Great Depression and the New Bargain policies imposed to remedy its effects were equally transformative in their impact on Georgia agronomics. U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt was fully familiar with the plight of rural Georgians from his years of polio treatments at Warm Springs, both prior to and throughout his presidency. Inaugurated in 1933, Roosevelt created the Agricultural Adjustment Administration during his first 100 days in office as an endeavour to raise crop prices by lowering agricultural production. An unintended consequence of the policy, however, was to put farmers out of work, causing even greater numbers to seek other means of employment. As a issue, rural communities struggled to maintain their populations in the face of dwindling farming income and the lack of industrial chore opportunities. Promising a surplus of cheap, nonunion labor and relying on a variety of inducements, some of which were financed past public subscription or deductions from workers' checks, several Georgia towns succeeded in attracting small-scale, depression-wage employers—mostly textile mills —in the 1930s.

The country'southward unique aviation history as well began during these years, and set up the phase for Georgia's afterward industrialization and economic prosperity. Ben Epps, considered to exist the begetter of aviation in the state, built and flew the first plane in Georgia on a field in Athens in 1907. In 1923 acclaimed aviator Charles Lindbergh flew his first solo flight at Souther Field in Americus, and two years afterward William B. Hartsfield, who later became mayor of Atlanta, established Hartsfield Drome (after Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport). Inside a few decades, the airport served equally a major hub for both Eastern Air Lines and Delta Air Lines, which moved its headquarters to Atlanta in 1941.

The The states' entry into World War Ii (1941-45) brought the Great Low to an end, equally industrial production for the war effort created thousands of new jobs around the nation. Georgia in particular felt these economical benefits, equally soldiers arrived for preparation at Fort Benning in Columbus, at that fourth dimension the largest infantry training mail in the world. The Bell Aircraft Corporation in Marietta, known as Bell Bomber, produced B-29 airplanes from 1943 until the end of the war, and by early 1945 the factory employed more than 28,000 workers. The ports of Savannah and Brunswick produced near 200 "Liberty Ships" between 1942 and 1945. The Southeastern Shipbuilding Corporation, based at a site on the Savannah River, employed more than than 15,000 workers.

The economic effect of such war activities across Georgia was significant, with annual personal income rising from less than $350 in 1940 to more than $i,000 by 1950, surpassing the national average. After the war the land continued to prosper, with Atlanta in particular experiencing a growth in industry and population. A transportation hub since its origins as a railroad town, the city was well positioned to conform this growth with the development of Hartsfield Airport from a regional facility into a national airport during the 1950s and 1960s. (By the belatedly twentieth century Hartsfield had become one of the busiest passenger airports in the globe.)

The Ceremonious Rights Era and Sunbelt Georgia

Every bit the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s unfolded, the interests, aims, and ambitions of Atlanta's political and economic leaders diverged dramatically in many ways from those that prevailed in the country at large. As the city's population surged, Atlanta voters chafed under the country'south canton unit of measurement system, which gave, for example, three rural counties with a combined population of 7,000 simply as much ascendancy in statewide elections as Fulton Canton, with its 550,000 inhabitants. The result was that the more racially moderate and economically progressive candidates generally favored by Atlantans had to fight an uphill battle against self-styled rustics and race-baiters like Eugene Talmadge, who won the governorship four times in the 1930s and 1940s without, as he bragged, ever campaigning in a canton with streetcars. Talmadge dominated the state's political scene until he died as governor-elect in 1946, precipitating the baroque and embarrassing three governor'southward controversy.

In 1954 the U.South. Supreme Courtroom ruled in Dark-brown v. Lath of Pedagogy that the "divide but equal" laws governing public education in Georgia and other southern states were unconstitutional. Although some Georgia politicians and citizens advocated closing the schools rather than constant by the courtroom'due south decision, and although the decision prompted the inclusion of the Confederate battle flag in the state flag redesign of 1956, the coin and ability accumulating in Atlanta finally asserted itself in 1960. That year the state's avowed segregationist governor, Ernest Vandiver Jr., appointed influential Atlanta lawyer and banker John A. Sibley to chair a special legislative committee to study the matter. Although 60 percent of witnesses who spoke at the hearings favored statewide schoolhouse closings, Atlanta'due south borough and concern leaders believed this route meant economic disaster for their urban center. They convinced the Sibley Committee to recommended a local selection on the matter.

Like pressure from Atlanta'south growth-oriented elite played a central role in dissuading Governor Vandiver from closing the University of Georgia when the courts ordered the admission of two Blackness students, Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter, in Jan 1961. Despite some resistance on the role of students and protests from effectually the land, the university's integration went far more smoothly than was the instance at either the University of Mississippi, in 1962, or the University of Alabama, in 1963.

In 1962 the federal district court struck downwards the canton unit system, unloosing Atlanta's massive political influence on a state accustomed to what i observer called "the rule of the rustics." Although Atlanta avoided the ugly confrontations that drew attention to the cities of Piddling Rock, Arkansas, and Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama, it remained a crucial centre for the civil rights movement, serving every bit the base of operations for native son Martin Luther King Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Commission (SNCC) as well established a strong presence in the state, most notably in the Albany Motion of 1961-62. The confrontation between Albany's constabulary-enforcement officers and a coalition of local Blackness leaders, with the back up of both the SCLC and SNCC, was considered the first grassroots effort to challenge desegregation on all fronts. The Albany Movement was too notable as the first such motility in which King participated after the Montgomery bus boycott, and it served as a precursor to the much larger mobilization of the movement in Birmingham in the spring of 1963.

In the wake of these developments, racial moderate Carl Sanders was elected governor in 1962 and worked during his term in office to bring Georgia into compliance with federal civil rights constabulary. The Voting Rights Human action of 1965, signed by U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson, forever contradistinct the political landscape of the state, with the number of registered African American voters doubling between 1960 and 1970. The number of Black elected officials also rose dramatically during these years, from three in 1962 to thirty by the end of the decade. By 2000 more 600 African American officials held office in Georgia.

The civil rights movement was largely implemented by the Democratic Party, which led to Georgia's white electorate breaking with the national party for the first time in the twentieth century. The so-called Solid Due south came to an end in the presidential election of 1964, every bit Georgia voters (like those throughout the South) gave conservative Republican Barry Goldwater 54 percent of their vote, thus repudiating the incumbent, President Johnson. A southern Democrat himself, but a champion of civil rights, Johnson won reelection in a national landslide. In 1966, when Sanders declined to run for a 2d term as governor, segregationist Lester Maddox won a surprising gubernatorial victory in Georgia, clearly demonstrating that many whites in the state continued to resist the social and political transformations of the era.

This shift toward the Republican Party connected both in Georgia and throughout the South. In subsequent presidential elections a majority of Georgia voters cast ballots for Republican candidates, with only two exceptions. Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, carried the state and the nation in 1976; he carried the state again in 1980, although he lost the election to Republican Ronald Reagan. Notably, Carter won a bulk of the state'due south Black vote only non the white, as did Arkansas native and presidential candidate Bill Clinton in 1992, demonstrating the continuing legacy of Black political power engendered by the civil rights move.

During the last three decades of the twentieth century, metropolitan Atlanta proved to exist the heart of the Sunbelt, a term applied to the economic and demographic resurgence of the southernmost swath of the country in the years post-obit Earth State of war II. Atlanta connected to expand both in size, as its borders sprawled into surrounding counties, and in influence at the land and national levels. The international delivery corporation United Parcel Service moved its headquarters to Atlanta during these years, while such homegrown entities equally Coca-Cola, The Home Depot, and Turner Dissemination (including CNN) thrived beyond the land'south borders. In 1996 Atlanta hosted the Centennial Summer Olympic Games, further raising the city'south profile and creating a lasting physical legacy through the construction of such venues as Centennial Olympic Park and other infrastructure improvements.

The carpet and poultry industries of north Georgia accomplished national prominence as well, while the agricultural regions in the southern counties maintained the state's reputation as a major producer of peaches, peanuts, and Vidalia onions. Farming, however, declined as a major occupation in Georgia, as smaller farms were subsumed past larger operations. The total farm population shrank from roughly 1 one thousand thousand in 1950 to around 63,000 in 2000.

Developments in the Twenty-first Century

In country politics white support for Democrats eroded steadily in the twenty-first century every bit Republicans rode their presidential momentum to victories further downwards the ticket. In 2003 Sonny Perdue became the start Republican governor since Reconstruction, and he hands won reelection in 2006. By 2009 the Republican Party controlled both houses of the General Assembly, and both of the land's U.S. senators were Republican, as were 7 of its thirteen members of the U.S. Business firm of Representatives. In 2008 Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama made a potent showing in Georgia, especially among Blackness voters, although he ultimately did not bear the state.

Georgia's economy experienced meaning shifts in the first decade of the twenty-showtime century, as manufacturing jobs, particularly in the state'south rural counties, moved overseas. Between 1997 and 2005 lone, rural counties bore the brunt of some 98,000 chore losses in manufacturing, the bulk of them full-bodied in the cloth and dress industries. Agricultural piece of work, conversely, brought thousands of immigrants, particularly Latinos, to the state, many of whom also found employment in the service and structure industries. Just with the outset of a national economic recession in 2008, many left to seek jobs elsewhere. The recession besides led to severe budget cuts in 2008 and 2009 that affected government services, including education, around the state.

Georgia experienced a significant drought mid-decade and engaged in protracted battles with neighboring states Florida and Alabama over access to water, much of which was existence diverted to support the continually expanding Atlanta metropolitan area. After calculation nearly 900,000 residents betwixt 2000 and 2006 alone, Atlanta surged past both Boston, Massachusetts, and Detroit, Michigan, to become the nation'due south ninth-largest metropolitan area, covering twenty-viii counties by 2007. The city continues to generate a significant portion of the state's income simply also deals with ongoing issues of poverty, particularly amongst its inner-city African American population. Poverty, exacerbated by the economic downturn, plagues many rural counties besides.

Despite such challenges, Georgia continues to attract new opportunities for employment. Kia Motors Corporation, a Korean auto manufacturer, broke footing on a factory in Troup County in 2006; major employer Delta Airlines emerged successfully from bankruptcy in 2007; and new taxation-incentive legislation for the entertainment industry, passed in 2008, brought numerous film projects to the country. Georgia's unique landscapes and culture back up a thriving tourism industry as well.